My Bloody Valentine's "Loveless", by Mike McGonigal

How wonderfully bizarre it was to start reading Mike McGonigal's contribution to the 33 1/3 book series and only a couple of days later, to be greeted with news of a long-awaited follow-up to "Loveless". More on that later on, but first, the book. McGonigal doesn't try to write a sensational expose or to uncover the untold "real story" behind the album. His opinion of the album sticks rigidly to the orthodox fanboy template -- he makes no attempt at criticism or to goad the reader into thinking about "Loveless" in a unique way. But all of this is made perfectly clear from the very beginning, as McGonigal bluntly states that the album has already been praised and dissected in so many different ways, while acknowledging that he doesn't feel that there's much left for him to write about in that regard. Instead, he digs into what has been a fairly untapped resource for information about "Loveless" -- the memories of the band members themselves. Kevin, Belinda, and Debbie are quoted at length from a series of exclusive interviews done specifically for this book during 2005 and 2006 (Colm declined to be interviewed). As far as I am aware, compared to any other piece that has been written about post-1992 MBV, this amount of access to the band members is unparalleled. McGonigal relies on them for fresh perspectives and to fill in previously unrevealed details, while for the most part he simply writes what he hears and resists the urge to play rock critic. Between the interviews, the few exercises in myth-busting, and McGonigal's easy-going style, it's plenty good enough to make this book an engaging read.*

[*aside: I found a bunch of typos and factual errors, but only one of them annoyed me: the continuing American habit of writing "You Made Me Realize" (American spelling). I can't think of another example in music in which two spellings of the title of a piece of music float around and people feel free to use whichever one is more convenient to them. McGonigal even makes light of it, getting all "well, that's the way we spell it here" on us, but this type of error is unforgiveable. The title of the EP is "You Made Me Realise". There is no editorial direction on titles. Does anyone in America have issues with the title of Talk Talk's "The Colour of Spring"? Should we be correcting the grammatical error in Oasis' "Standing on the Shoulder of Giants"? Is anyone insisting that the text of "Hamlet" should be translated to take into account modern American spellings? The whole realise/realize thing is so stupid.]

I was giddy to learn that Shields consciously borrowed from Phil Spector's production style, even as far as recording entire songs in mono (e.g. "To Here Knows When"!). The MBV-Spector similarities always seemed natural and obvious to me, and I am happy to finally find out that the connection was genuine and intentional. The most controversial chapter deals with the cost of the album and the relationship with their former label Creation. The book was pulled from printing, at the band's request, because Shields was displeased with how McGonigal told this portion of the story (granted, it's only fitting that the release of a book about "Loveless" would be subject to a series of delays). Shields felt that McGonigal was sourcing too heavily from David Cavanaugh's "The Creation Records Story: My Magpie Eyes Are Hungry For the Prize", saying that it read like an accountant's take on things and that 80% of that book was made up. He goes on to claim, with ever greater and more ridiculous hyperbole, that Cavanaugh's book has dropped out of sight and practically vanished from the realm of publishing history, because everyone knows how ridiculous it truly is.

Sure, compared to Oprah's Book Club, Cavanaugh's book wasn't a big seller. Inasmuch as a book about UK indie rock can be termed "successful", "The Creation Records Story" has done quite well for itself and is fairly well-respected. It breaks down the lives of the people who ran the label in impeccably well-researched detail, but was far weaker in providing intimate detail about the bands, some of whom did not cooperate with Cavanaugh while he was writing the book. McGonigal, as you might expect, remains neutral on the subject, inasmuch as he doesn't try to take sides and declare who he'd rather believe. He quite plainly rewrote the chapter to give more space to Shields' side of the story, but continues to reference Cavanaugh throughout this book. This has to be viewed as a smart decision in the interest of having his book see the light of day.

I have no idea if Shields still has an axe to grind with McGee. Maybe he overreacted to being reminded of McGee's reminiscences, as they were told via Cavanaugh. His comments carried a strong whiff of sour grapes from where I sit (AKA the truth hurts"?), but that's something that we will never know for certain. Fifteen years on, McGee has managed to let bygones be bygones and has gone out of his way in interviews to praise MBV. He even called them the best band he ever had on Creation. Granted, these are feelings that he can afford to have after earning zillions from Oasis and shutting down his label on (more or less) his own terms, as opposed to being forced into bankruptcy by MBV's spending habits. From Shields' side, "Loveless" ended up sounding exactly how he wanted it to, and it continues to sell and to provide him with a steady income. So what gives? McGonigal's new interviews demonstrate that McGee and Shields' memories of 1989-1991 are so divergent that there is absolutely no middle ground with which to reconcile their stories. McGee tells of numerous near-breakdowns from various Creation employees and and having to borrow cash from his parents to release master tapes of "Loveless" in exchange for unpaid studio bills. Shields tells of the entire band being literally homeless during that time, squatting at friends' flats because Creation claimed they didn't have the money to pay them regular salaries. What's more, he says "Loveless" didn't cost Creation anything because it was recorded using MBV's own money that they had earned through sales of their other records.

For the rest of us, it's an individual choice as to whose persons' version of the truth is more trustworthy. My take is that Shields was far too immersed in his own problems at the time (finishing the album plus his deteriorating relationship with Belinda, both of which are discussed quite candidly in the book) and was not seeing the big picture. By secluding himself in an all-out effort to craft the album as he wanted it, he probably took no notice of how many livelihoods were dependent on the decisions he was making. In a fair bit of high comedy, he confidently claims that he added up those studio bills himself (um, from memory, and long after the fact) and the total couldn't possibly be any more than 160K pounds. You know, nowhere close to the 250K that other people have claimed, end of story, why the complaints?, no sirree, get off my back jack, etc. Yes, a measly 160K -- a mere pittance for an indie label run by drug-inhaling hooligans who, collectively, didn't even have a sixth grader's grasp of accounting.

Last week saw MBV retake the lead in their sixteen year race versus Guns N Roses to be the first to release the long-awaited, prohibitively expensive, endlessly delayed follow-up to their highly acclaimed November 1991 album. Axl and his hired guns looked to have built an insurmountable lead once they started touring again, but talk of a release date for "Chinese Democracy" has died down considerably in the past couple of years. Little did we know that MBV were lulling us all into a false sense of security while they retooled and readied their Myspace page for worldwide release!

We all tend to get misty-eyed even at the vaguest details about any remote possibility of perhaps maybe hearing some new MBV material, and although this kind of news still tugs at my heartstrings, in my head I know better than to get excited because we've heard all this before. Many many many times, in fact. McGonigal cops out a bit at the end of his book, alluding that "Loveless" is so good that he has no burning need to ever hear another MBV record and that we should all stop bugging Kevin about it, because the guy really has been busy all these years. I call bullshit. People only make these kinds of excuses for bands once they've been lying dormant for near-geologic periods, at which point mythologizing takes the place of instinctual anticipation. Nobody would have claimed, in 1993 (or 1994 or 1995 or 1996) that "Loveless" was just too damn good, so don't bother with the follow-up. There hasn't been another MBV record because Shields hasn't gotten around to making one, not because of the distractions of broken mixing desks, interpersonal band relations, and other side projects.

He didn't have a problem getting off his ass to release material under the MBV name for the "Offbeat: A Red Hot Soundtrip" compilation. This album, BTW, kicked off the first bout of "they're back now ... no really!" hysteria as it featured the first new material released under the MBV name since 1993. It happened so long ago that a lot of fans don't even remember that particular "comeback" (McGonigal neglected to mention it in his review of the band's post-"Loveless" activities). The waiting has gone on for so long that it literally dates back to the days when I first discovered the internet and would track down MBV fan sites and message boards to look for info on their new record. One year, I remember reading about how MBV were under pressure to deliver some sort of finished product to Island, but no prob, Shields claimed that he was 100% sure they'd have at least an EP done by the end of the year. I believe that year was 1997. In 2004, Amazon incredibly began taking pre-orders for an MBV box set that featured remastered and live material. There was even a shipping date listed.

To sum it up: I haven't stopped hoping, but I've definitely stopped offering predictions.

[update 15/11/07 ... and the very next day, they announce tour dates. A Coachella appearance is rumoured for 2008, and I am currently entertaining silly dreams of flying to California if that happens.]

Amy Winehouse and the rest of the MTV Europe Awards

The Bad: Ummmm ... the entire show, actually. The whole thing crept by like some never-ending joke that I -- and more importantly, the Munich audience -- weren't getting. There were no show-stealing, kitchen-sink performances like the ones that Kanye West can put on with regularity. The endless string of bar scenes hosted by the Foo Fighters were the very definition of a time filler. Sitting at home, I enjoyed Snoop's mini-monologues, but almost everything he said was met with a flat response, with the exception of the "how you doin' Europe"-type exclamations that prodded the audience to cheer. After a while, I got the feeling that the muted response was because most of the people in attendance didn't understand his accent.

The program directors made a major mis-step with some of the guests and talent, in that they didn't seem to have a clue what the Munich crowd wanted to see. When Paul van Dyk gets zero reaction, and local boy Boris Becker gets 1/3 the reaction of Nelly Furtado, then you've booked the wrong people. Getting the right local or national acts onto the show should be childs play. One of the most intriguing things about the EMA's being held in a different country every year is that you get to see the superstar reactions for national heroes that we (people who don't live in those countries) haven't heard of. A few years ago, Rammstein played the EMA's in Frankfurt and the crowd rewrote the book on "going apeshit". Where was this year's Rammstein?

The Good:
1. Snoop's lederhosen. Everything Snoop wore.

2. The raised awards podium overlooking the entire arena.

3. The magician in the bar (the only redeeming quality of those bar scenes).

4. Amy Winehouse. OMG Amy Winehouse. Between Pete Doherty and Amy Winehouse, there was bound to be some kind of drug and alcohol-induced meltdown. Well, Doherty was well-behaved. Amy Winehouse made Britney Spears' appearance at the MTV Awards look like tea and crumpets at the Ritz.

The problem with scoring Amy Winehouse as a last-minute addition to an awards show was made brilliantly clear -- booking her the week before the show doesn't give her handlers enough time to sober her up. First, she accepted an award in front of a crowd that adored her. Obviously zonked on some wild paranoia-inducing stuff, she slowly and deliberatively walked to the mic, eyes peering around her as if preparing herself to be ambushed at any moment. She stood in front of the mic for a few moments, soaking in the cheers inasmuch as anyone so doped up could possibly soak in anything other than the rapidly-chattering voices racing through her head, sputtered a quiet "thank you", and slowly turned around to leave. Boos were clearly audible.

Part of me (0.00001%) still held out hope that it was all simply a case of nerves. The next hour did nothing to improve her condition, and only five seconds into her performance of "Back To Black", her background singers and her band were doing their best to not laugh on stage. Their professionalism stood in obviously contrast to Winehouse's out-of-tune, incomprehensible warbling. Considering that her band knew exactly where they were (performing on the MTV Europe Awards in front of one billion people) and Winehouse didn't have a clue if she was in Munich, Mumbai, or the women's bathroom in the bar where she snorted drugs the previous night, the contrast was hardly surprising.

At times, she tried to dance, or at least perform various motions that were vaguely synchronized to the music. She could barely coordinate herself enough to place her hand on her hip and keep it there. She looked down for nearly the entire performance. When she wasn't doing that, she was blankly staring into space toward nothing in particular, her head slightly cocked to one side, Her hairdo was piled high over her head and almost appeared to be weighing her down. Her caked-on makeup made her look much older than her 24 years.

I'm listing this under "the Good" because it was the only truly memorable happening of the night, the only appearance that we'll still remember once next year's show rolls around. I suppose I enjoyed all this in the same sense that I'd enjoy any other celebrity train wreck, but it's too bad that Amy Winehouse has been trying so damned hard to unravel her life in public over the past few months.

The Very Rough Guide to Good Albums

I'm always writing about end-of-year lists (my lists, other people's lists, year-end polls ...) but I don't write much about exactly what makes a good album so good, a great album so great, or a Best Album of the Year so different from All the Other Albums of the Year. With a hefty dose of arbitrariness, let's identify a few categories and demonstrate their utility by using some recent albums (including those from 2007) as examples.

Strongly unbalanced albums. These albums contain one or two exceptional songs that basically obliterate everything else on there. Note the contrast with the Verve release, which is 2/3 godlike, 1/3 ordinary; whereas the strongly unbalanced album is more like 1/3 godlike, 2/3 material of unspecified quality (which could actually be quite good, just nowhere close to the quality of the other 1/3). It's been that kind of year for members of Animal Collective. "Strawberry Jam" contains "Reverend Green", "Fireworks", and a bunch of other tracks that are left in their dust. Panda Bear's "Person Pitch" has "Bros", which is not only the best track on the album but is one of the best of the year.

In subcatagorizing these two, the key difference between them is to consider what you're left with once you remove that fantastic leading 1/3. Is the remaining 2/3 still essential listening? If "Yes", then that album is Top Ten of the Year material in most years, if "No", then it's most likely not. Applied to "Strawberry Jam", the answer is "not really", but with "Person Pitch", it's "absolutely". Last year, "Altar" by SunnO))) and Boris fit the "Yes" category, and "The Air Force" by Xiu Xiu came closest to fulfilling the "No" condition, but in a year where the quality of the Top Ten falls off precipitously after #5 or so, albums like that can still rank as high as #8. Compare this to 2005, which was a much stronger year. Here, I'd maybe slot Madonna (#20a) and Six By Seven (#18) into the "No" category, and even then those are borderline calls.

Pleasant albums. Decent enough, but not so good that you would ever listen to it on its own, without either cooking, reading, watching TV, working, or some other very common music-listening mental distraction. Perfect for random play, either by itself or lumped in with a few more albums. Apparat's "Walls" fits the description very well. The major flaw with this type of album, obviously, is that you listen to it without really *listening* to it, so the melodies have a memory half-life that lasts to the end of the day at best. In the long run you never bother getting too attached to this kind of album, and they essentially drop out of one's personal consciousness once the calendar year is out and newer albums start getting A-space placement on one's hard drive or CD rack. In a weak year, these can crack the personal Top Ten due to the force of oft-listened familiarity (i.e. Jan Jellinek's "Tierbeobachtungen" in 2006). Ordinarily, you'd prefer to not have these mini-albatrosses around your neck when reviewing your charts a few years down the line, but in most years, I think you'd be hard-pressed -- be it as a fan or a critic -- to not have one or two of these albums in your Top Ten each year. There's nothing wrong with having a bit of audio junk food lying around, it's just a natural element of everyday musical enjoyment.

Rotating favourite song. This is #1 on my list of ways to separate the Album of the Year Contenders and Personal Classics in the Making from the sizable chaff of more ordinary musical releases. Maybe you don't think it's such a rare thing that one's favourite song would hop around an album during the course of a year. I believe that most of the time, people's favourites get locked in after two or three listens. Sometimes these are the inescapable singles, but not necessarily.

This year, I'm not sure that any albums fit this category for me, which is a bit worrying because even in the weakest years, there tends to be at least one album like this that stands out. Even a weak year like 2006 had "Ticket Crystals", but 2007 has been a much better year for albums overall. 2005 was even stronger and provided two textbook cases in "Takk ..." and "Before the Dawn Heals Us".

Once in a while, there are exceptions, where an album doesn't really come close to being the best of the year, but features rotating favourite songs. I find that The Arcade Fire's "Funeral" is one rare example of this.

The Internet Concert Experience

1. NPR brings the goods ... I listened to the Animal Collective show today, and it was great to finally hear a quality sound recording of their tour. The new songs, despite my initial reservations, have been really growing on me, particularly "Dancer" and "Brother Sport". The extended, stripped-down reworkings of "Fireworks" (now "Fireworks/Essplode/Fireworks") are simply spectacular.

I'm unfamiliar with "All Songs Considered" host Bob Boilen, but if his comments before and after the concerts are anything to judge him on, then I fear for the brainlessness of his interviews. Thanks to Boilen, I have learned that the crowds at these shows really love the bands on stage, and can go crazy when hearing songs that they like. Imagine that, fans paying money to see their favourite bands play concerts and having a good time while watching them on stage.

2. Time to start following Les Inrockutibles online (and to brush up on my French). This link is for an Animal Collective session, but there's plenty of juicy-looking stuff in the archives. As of this writing, the lead story and live video is by Sigur Ros, and speaking of which ...

3. The "Heima" soundtrack is streaming on their Myspace page now. The complete track listing is featured in the media player, but it makes for a fairly short 2CD package (less than 100 minutes) if this is exactly what will appear on the official release. The new songs aren't flooring me, after one listen, I felt that they were trying too hard to sound expansive. Then again, you could level that criticism against everything Sigur Ros have ever recorded, so maybe I need to hear this a few more times. Highlights were "Samskeyti" and the first (of two!) ten-minute versions of "Von", which aims for -- and reaches -- the epic, string-drenched, heart-sobbing heights of the renditions they occasionally played on their 2002 tour (search: the Vienna version, which is probably the single greatest song they have recorded to date).

All this discussion may be irrelevant because the songs likely don't make sense outside of the context of the film.

Orbital, "Live at Glastonbury", Paul Hartnoll, "The Ideal Condition"

It's hard to believe that Orbital split up only three years back because it already feels like it was a long, long time ago. Their post-90's output (actually, their post-1996 or 1997 output) occasionally bordered on embarrassing, and was for the most part simply a portrait of a couple of ex-ravers trying to cheer themselves up and remind themselves of a time when techno was more fun and didn't have to be about depressing topics like religiously-themed alien abduction and saving the whales.

If nothing else, the DVD is a reminder of how much has changed in live video display technology over the past decade or so. Simple video loops and the occasional vibrating sine wave was the apex of high-tech in 1994. These nervous, spastic oscilloscope traces provided a sensible backdrop for the all too prevalent pre-millenial jitters of the time. Years later, live techno and spectacular video accompaniment went hand-in-hand. Their 2002 show, which was bathed in enormous quantities of light and colour, is a striking example of this.

Nevertheless, putting all splashiness aside, the 2002 and 2004 shows contain music that was completely out of sync with the times. It feels like it's been so long since Orbital broke up because in those final years, it was as if they had already gone missing. The bleeps, the drum loops, the goofy waving to the crowd (not to mention hearing the Belinda/Bon Jovi samples for the 100000th time) were all the work of a rave relic from a time long past. The cheery anthems of "The Altogether" couldn't sound more out of place when heard alongside the clicky, minimal techno and house that was coming into prominence at the time. Even when held up against electroclash, the short-lived semi-movement that supposedly brought dancing and fun back to European dance culture, Orbital's work in 2001-2 stands out as a curious time piece -- they represent the persistent hanging around of the old guard, a throwback to the dancing habits of the previous generation starring a once-legendary group churning out crowd pleasing hits to a crusty festival crowd, but nothing more.

I could stop there, but you probably know that there's more to it than that little exercise in myopic (albeit truthful) analysis. Focusing on any one year is to miss their career's overall plot arc. Adhering to this type of tunnel vision is not a fair analysis considering that this CD/DVD collection is a multi-part retrospective of a band whose widest fame was founded and perpetuated over a decade at this very festival. It ignores the pivotal role that Orbital played in making "live techno" something other than an oxymoron with a convenient punchline. It ignores how they were one of Glastonbury's most consistent draws during the past decade -- including the historical importance of their breakout 1994 gig (which almost singlehandedly dug techno from the never-read middle pages of the music weeklies and vaulting it onto the front cover) and how bringing the Orbital project to a permanent close in the same place exactly ten years later was the obvious and fitting conclusion to their amazing career. Fully appreciating the 2004 gig is only possible by viewing the performances from the intervening years.

The sequencing and track selections are exceptional. Considering the restrictions imposed during the compilation process (approx. equal time given to each of the five performances, keeping the total running time to a little over two hours, no repeated tracks), this is just about the best selection possible. "Walk Now" might seem like an unusual choice for opening the set, but it was important to capture a portion of the incredible 1994 show in sequence, and they wisely chose to feature a section with the unedited "Are We Here" and the gorgeous "Attached", which even then was rarely performed live despite being one of the best songs Orbital ever recorded. The next year, they played mainly the same tracks as they had in 1994, and in that vein, the 1995 selections capture the middle third of that set. "Impact" is included, naturally, since no live Orbital comp could possibly claim to be complete without it (probably the only track for which I would make that claim).

The selections from 1999 illustrate why that year was a transition period for Orbital. They began settling into the grandfatherly role that they'd happily entrench themselves in for the next five years. The live sets began reflecting that, turning into "greatest hits" galas rather than focusing on their newest material. "Halcyon" might have been a sure-fire crowd pleaser, but they'd been caning it live for years with hardly any variation. It had become representative of how much their show needed freshening up if they wanted to progress as a live band. But they didn't want that, and were content to continue relying on various combinations of tracks like "Halcyon", "Chime", "Satan" to pop the crowds. Whether that's a positive or a negative is largely a matter of personal taste, I suppose. Their sensational take on "Style/Bagpipe Style" shows how things might have turned out if they'd pushed a more challenging, kitchen sink approach. "Middle of Nowhere" turned out to be more influential than it had any right to be, once the likes of Apparat and Ellen Allien dusted off those grinning, pinball machine melodies.

"The Altogether" might have been a weak album, but its two best moments, "Frenetic" and "Funny Break" sparkle in this extended, proggy form, rubbing shoulders next to "The Girl With the Sun In Her Head" and "Belfast" (arguably Orbital's finest moment). Along with the hypnotizing light show, this four track segment is a grower that very nearly steals the whole CD/DVD set, with only the 1994 selections rivaling it for emotional heft, variety, and dancefloor bliss.

The 2004 set was a semi-big deal in musical circles, for it was billed as Orbital's final gig (in actual fact, they played one final gig a few days later on John Peel's show, which in turn was one of the last shows that *he* ever did). It was important enough for the BBC to broadcast it live on the web, resulting in one of the sunniest moments in yours trulys' otherwise drab summer of 2004, thanks to a pile of beers and Orbital blasting through the amplifier. The "Dr. Who"/"Chime" setcapper could be seen from a mile away but there was really no other acceptable way to bring their career to a close than with their most famous song and three or four fake endings. Fischerspooner were paid a zillion dollars by record execs who hoped they could create moments like this. The fact that they couldn't pull it off (and to be fair, nobody else could or is currently threatening to) shows how singular Orbital truly were. They went from playing raves and small club dates to being Glastonbury headliners and NME gossip fodder in a matter of months (1994 was definitely the year for that type of mercurial success in the UK, although Blur and Oasis accomplished it on a much higher level). They helped drag techno onto critics lists and became pop stars all the same, even gaining a mild following in the US and headlining a great Lollapalooza that nobody remembers. Their music could ring triumphant in the key of E or exude paranoia and despair -- and both sides of the coin resulted in some of the most recognizable tracks of their career. Any remaining doubters must turn to this CD/DVD to see how they did it.

Afterward, there's an opportunity for lifting any lingering sadness over Orbital's absence from the music world. Thankfully, the story continues with Paul Hartnoll's "The Ideal Condition" On initial listens, it appeared to pick up roughly where Orbital left off, i.e. with bleepy melodic techno with a strong pop flavour that includes vocals and actual choruses. Once I peer deeper (the benefit of a few months of hindsight definitely helps), these similarities feel more superficial, and are mainly chalked up to the eye for variety shared by the "Blue Album" and "The Ideal Condition". Both albums mesh several styles successfully, but Hartnoll never attempts any "Impact"-style thumpers like "One Perfect Sunrise", and thankfully stays well clear of the inane goofiness of "Acid Pants".

Instead, "The Ideal Condition" picks up where the first minute of "Middle of Nowhere" left off. During that glorious opening of "Way Out", it was looking like Orbital had constructed something even more grandiose than "In Sides" -- a weepy techno album stuffed with epic symphonic touches. "Haven't We Met Before", the strings-only album closer "Dust Motes", and the jaunty, Mozartian "Unsteady Waltz" display the compositional flair that "Way Out" hinted at only fleetingly. "Simple Sounds" recalls the bleepy, classic sound of Orbital at their best, but adds some bonus retro chic in the form of chirpy flute solos that would have been at home on early 70's Kraftwerk albums. Best of all, "Please" arrives insta-ready for festival performances and radio play. It's swooning chorus intones "you know you've got me", and who can resist a song that tells you that you can't resist it? Who would have expected this from Robert Smith -- yes, that Robert Smith -- at this point in his career? "Please" is the type of playful, cheeky song that he's tried to capture ever since "Lovecats", and since "Lovecats" is basically intolerable these days, I propose that we erase it from the minds of mankind and put "Please" in its spot.

All in all, it's the strongest effort by a Hartnoll since "Middle of Nowhere", and maybe even including "Middle of Nowhere" (which had a fairly boring middle third, a problem that doesn't plague "The Ideal Condition" with its sleek 45 minute run time).

Three Follow-Ups

Sigur Ros, "Heima". This is the title of their new DVD, which they've been screening all week. If the trailer is anything to go by, it's going to be spectacular. My voice is cracking into falsetto just thinking about it. It's looking like a two hour love letter to Iceland, a series of breathtaking postcards, which all in all, composes the best propaganda film that the Icelandic Tourism Ministry could have ever hoped for. All this, plus some new music!

I must say that I feel vindicated when it comes to Sigur Ros. I praised the Untitled album at a time when most others had stopped fawning over their music using a generous array of cryptic glacier references, and had switched to descriptors like "boring", "coma-inducing", "unbearably pretentious", while making fun of lyrics sung in "Hopelandish" (fine, that last one still kind of applies). Now they're encroaching on a spot as the heartstring-pulling, symphonic Pink Floyd that it's OK to like. Yay!

The Go Team, "Proof of Youth". As follow-ups go, this one is as indistinguishable from its predecessor as any album I can remember. Sure, there are general similarities between "Proof of Youth" and "Thunder Lightning Strike" (length, pacing, production, etc.) but one can easily trainspot on a song-by-song basis too. It's almost as if they simply sat in the studio with the latter album, went through it track by track, and for each one they said "let's write another song just like this". Most notably, "Patricia's Moving Picture" with it's bittersweet, dewy optimism, succeeds in 1) closing the album, 2) feeling quite out of place with the rest of the album, but a perfect chill-down, album closer all the same, 3) being probably the best track on the record. All of these qualities can be applied to "Everyone's a VIP To Someone", the closing track on "TLS". Even the basic structure of the songs are almost xerox copies of each other, right down to the double-repeated big finish.

The only meaningful difference between the two albums, at least to my ears, is that "PoY" is even goofier and more playful than "TLS", as implausible as that might sound. In parts, I feel that I'm nodding my head to a segment of a "Sesame Street" soundtrack, particularly during the jump rope-ing, singalong chorus of "Doing It Right". The other difference, unfortunately, is that "PoY" isn't as good as "TLS", which was the catchiest thing since chicken pox and became embedded in my head right from the first listen.

On an opposite tack, PJ Harvey usually pulls an about-face with each new album, and "White Chalk" is no exception (and thankfully so, considering the horrible quality of her career nadir, "Uh Huh Her"). It's mostly claustrophobic piano-led ballads, with PJH channeling a fair bit of Tori Amos but also the angel-haired folk weirdness of Joanna Newsom. In fact, if I'm reading tea leaves for 2007 Pazz and Jop, I'm thinking that the combination of PJH name recognition (not to mention her high status among the votership as a two-time album of the year winner) plus spin-offs of the 2006 "Y's" vote could add up to a high showing for "White Chalk" in the poll.

New Pornographers, "Challengers"; Emma Pollack, "Adrenaline" (single)

New Pornographers have been indie rock poster children practically since their conception. With those accolades come responsibilities such as the need to exude geeky cool, spew quirky lyrical imagery. and other indie rock hallmarks. They'd settled on a formula that had produced three nearly indistinguishable albums, a formula that they could have pleasantly ridden with until the end of time or until they got bored with it. Many fans would have been perfectly happy with the first option, but it seems that the second option was the one that actually came to pass. "Challengers" is a pop album with wistful boy/girl vocal interplay and the breeziest, catchiest tunes of their career by far. Their over-reliance on choppy tempos and bouncy guitar hacking has nearly vanished -- in its place, we have the new Delgados. In the meantime, former Delgado Emma Pollack wants to be the new Coldplay. Or maybe she is moonlighting as an uncredited songwriter on the new New Pornographers album?

Seefeel, "Quique" (reissue)

Even when they were around, Seefeel were criminally underrated, and now that they've long since split, they've been sadly forgotten. Their blending of MBV's guitar pyrotechnics, Cocteau Twins' ethereal hymns, and the Orb's free-range flotation was completely out of place with anything going on in rock or techno at the time (there were some exceptions, such as A R Kane, although they had long since jumped the shark by 1993. Nevertheless, their latter-day "dreampop" was a virtual blueprint for what Slowdive would do shortly before they too disintegrated). By not fitting into any then-existing scenes, they never found their fan-base niche, thereby leaving few people behind who were likely to remember them. Then again, they flaunted their outsider status in interviews, so one could say that they were working hard at tarnishing their eventual legacy practically from the moment they first started getting press. And yet again, if you absolutely *had* to shoehorn them somewhere, it would be with the crowd of occasional ravers with a strong curiosity for techno but who, nonetheless, were more comfortable getting stoned in their basements than in going out dancing. In other words, Seefeel's fans were prototype IDM'ers, but unfortunately for the band, that genre and fanbase didn't exist yet as an outlet for this type of music.

Despite being a near-completist, I never owned "Quique" on CD. I still have my old cassette version, which somehow never got re-purchased along with my other 1993 cassette faves (the relative unavailability of "Quique" has something to do with that). Overall, Seefeel dominated my listening habits across multiple formats in 1994. The "Polyfusia" compilation was one of the first five or so CDs that I ever bought. It is a strong encapsulation of early Seefeel before they got all weirded out and ditched the guitars for something far more sinister. Afterward, the band became dominated by the sounds in Mark Clifford's head. Fletcher, Seymour and Peacock later regrouped as Scala, more or less picking up where Seefeel c. 1993 had left off. But once the calendar flipped to 1994, the actual Seefeel started to split from the style they'd become known for, beginning with the "Starethroughs EP". Darker and dubbier than anything they'd released to that point, each successive track is more frightening than the one before it, virtually telegraphing their eventual slide into paranoid isolationism as the EP plays on.

The "Fracture/Tied EP", which was released as a 10" single in the leadup to the release of their second album "Succour", was undoubtedly the point of no return. Even at their most other-worldliness, the Cocteau Twins' music was always grounded in a certain warmth and compassion thanks to Liz Frazer's voice and Robin Guthrie's shimmering layers of guitar. Any remaining stylistic links between the Cocteaus and Seefeel dropped out of sight with this EP. The A-side's crackling rhythms, akin to flailing away on an aluminum pie plate with a wooden spoon, signified the end of their fascinations with guitar and the emergence of a jittery, mechanical form of ambient isolationism. Autechre were one year behind Seefeel at this stage -- with "Amber", they were going through their own "warm" phase, and by the next year, they'd take tracks like "Fracture" to their limits by crafting something even more inhuman, more alien.

But before their music drifted off into those neo-industrial wastelands, there was "Quique". Seefeel at their most accessible, synth-tickling, sunshine-drenched best. The Seefeel that were ten years ahead of their time in anticipating Morr Music and a host of other guitar strumming folktronica bands, which is undoubtedly why most of "Quique" remains remarkably fresh. In the liner notes, Mark Clifford writes how he'd forgotten how little unreleased music was left from that period. That means they were scraping the bottom of a very shallow barrel when compiling the second CD, most of which is vastly inferior to the material on the proper album. So credit goes to the band for making wise choices back in 1993 with their track selections on the album. Regardless, fans will certainly enjoy hearing as much as possible from "Quique"-era Seefeel, and curious not-yet fans are in for a treat.

Animal Collective, "Strawberry Jam"

Until quite recently, Animal Collective took a somewhat lackadaisical approach to, well, let's call it "full band participation". Those who wanted to involve themselves with a project under the AC name were welcome, and if they stayed away for whatever reason, then it was no big deal. Before the release of "Strawberry Jam", only "Campfire Songs" and "Feels" were recorded with input from all four band members. Once the band's critical and popular acclaim hit a new peak in 2005 with "Feels", it appears that they hit a turning point. Every subsequent release would have too much riding on it to not require everyone's full attention. Suddenly they had to concern themselves with things like their creative direction and long-term career planning, instead of just mucking around in the studio or at live gigs with whoever happened to be around.

This is a band that loves to experiment with new songs on tour -- most songs on "Feels" had been regularly played live for nearly two years before the album was released, and the same can be said for nearly everything on "Strawberry Jam" (even current live sets feature a spate of even newer songs). Writer's block is apparently a non-issue with these guys. Deciding how the album would eventually sound presented a greater difficulty. But they knew they didn't want it to sound anything like "Feels".

"Feels" was their guitar album. That means their obsession with doing something different -- without guitars -- meant that they had to remove all the best things about "Feels". The gauzy drones that backed so much of the record highlighted nearly every track from a sonic standpoint and provided a counterbalance to the band's zanier impulses. I used to be (and still am) nonplussed by most AC records, and only joined the ranks of the converted with "Feels". With each new release, the superfans emerge to decry the more restrained sound of the album compared with their more freeflowing live shows. And now I've become one of them, because a big complaint I have with "Strawberry Jam". But I also worship at the feet of guitar-drenched albums like "Feels". What else, other than those swarming layers of guitar, could have linked "Flesh Canoe" (which slots itself beautifully next to MBV's "Glider" period) with "The Purple Bottle"'s frantic ode to giddy love?

So "Strawberry Jam" is their electronic album, and it's not that they go too far with the electronics, but that they don't go far enough. Once you subtract the sonic density behind many AC recordings, then the zonked out wackiness starts coming to the forefront, and that's not a good thing. Without enough sound smacking you in the face, parts of "Strawberry Jam" come off like They Might Be Giants with a few electronic bleeps added in. "Reverend Green" ups the sonic mayhem until it reaches a blissful density overload, and along with "Fireworks", these tracks build majestically and jam their way into the kind of semi-epic explorations that the band typically excels at. "Peace Bone" contains the type of pogo-beat and caveman chanting that they use for all their singles, and although the formula is a fun one, it doesn't go far enough over the top. Instead of the wimpy, two dollar electronic backbeat, they could have gone full-mode crazed hardcore techno and blasted the track into overdrive, but even that would have put them in a virtual tie with what Super Furry Animals were doing ten years ago (example: "Mountain People").

Still, the band is on a hot streak where nearly everything they do feels at least a little bit right (although the new tracks they've been playing live aren't exciting me at all just yet). I'm not sure I'd put money on this album not being embarrassingly unlistenable in a few years, though.

Britney Spears, "Gimme More"

This leaked track (leaked by Britney's people to build advance hype, no doubt) has been kicking around the internet for about a week now, and most opinions range between "better than expected" and "fairly impressed". I have no idea where one draws that reaction from a track so horrible. From the opening seconds, straight from the "it's Britney, bitch" opening line (oh, she's sounding it off now, she's so baaad ... don't call it a comeback!) and the muffled, "vocals from a megaphone" whining that kicks off 90% of her repertoire, it's clear that Britney hasn't woken up to the fact that it's 2007 and she might want to try something a bit different. The beat is lifeless and pedestrian, and the croaky two-word chorus is about as catchy and addictive as piss-flavoured cigarettes. One minute and a half into it, the load is blown and the song runs out of anything interesting to say or do, and the rest is little more than endless repetitions on the chorus ("Hey Jude" it isn't), filling time until the allotted four minute time slot runs out.

postscript: I wrote this on the afternoon of (i.e. before!) the MTV Video Awards ... honest!